Career Center students gaining workforce skills

By Bethany Royer

January 17, 2014

By Bethany J. Royer

Staff Writer

broyer@civitasmedia.com

Editor’s Note: This is part six of a continuing series on donations and the Upper Valley Career Center. Part one ran Saturday, Nov. 30, part two Dec. 7, part three Dec. 21, part four Dec. 28 and part five Jan. 11.

PIQUA — From a donated Monte Carlo to a prototype trebuchet launch, a lot of ground has been covered over a month’s time on the many programs offered at the Upper Valley Career Center and how donations make a big differenceboth on the budget and in student success.

We last left with a tour being given by Terry Krogman, instructional supervisor, back in November, and the school preparing for an open house. The latter undertaken by the Design and Digital Print Technologies class, with students working on a variety of pop-culture zombie-related designs. Whether it was to decorate the halls with hand and footprints or gifts specially made for visitors such as zombies on buttons, mouse pads, or notepads. Items the class used to showcase their state-of-the art handiwork.

However, before stepping into the classroom, Krogman took a brief detour so as to introduce the Pre-engineering and Design Technologies program that was a-buzz with students working on a variety of projects. That included Josh Detrick, a senior and local officer for SkillsUSA (Recent elected Southwest Region Parliamentarian) who took the tour-reins from Krogman beginning with a quick rundown on the latest software utilized in the program. Those included Inventor, AutoCAD Mechanical and Architecture, to name a few, before taking a few minutes to showcase several BattleBots designed and constructed for competitions by the students.

“I think we are better with the defensive bots than the offensive bots,” said Detrick (The class took second place at nationals) as he touched base on everything from weapons to wedges, specific weights and pre-made models that must be taken into consideration before bringing the robot to life.

Along with Detrick was Arian Braun, also a senior and in Medical Information Management, who was elected as the Southwest Region Historian for SkillsUSA.

“These guys worked so hard,” said Deborah Luellen, Pre-engineering and Design Technologies program instructor, of Braun and Detrick achieving regional selection for SkillsUSA as they must compete against much larger schools. “It’s a wonderful activity for them.”

Both Luellen and Braun emphasized learning about politics in the SkillsUSA program, one Krogman provided a bit of history on, from its comparison to FFA (Future Farmers of America) but more predominate. Or the difference between the two such as anything related to agriculture falling under the FFA distinction and anything related to trades as SkillsUSA with an estimated 600 out of the 800 UVCC student population in the program.

SkillsUSA serves more than 300,000 students and instructors with 13,000 school chapters, and is a partnership of students, teachers and industry for a skilled American workforce (www.skillsusa.org).

Stay tuned …

Bethany J. Royer may be reached at 773-2721 or on Twitter @TheDailyCall